Sunday, March 28, 2010

If you have Rogers Cable TV, then you probably noticed that now when you hit the "GUIDE" button, that new Rogers Quick Start Menu comes up. And as a result, in order to get to the actual TV Guide, you now have to press the GUIDE button twice.

I remember the first time I saw it, I was interested and I went around and tried out everything that was available within it...

But let me just say that that initial excitement and interest quickly changed into annoyance, frustration and anger, and an eventual realization that the entire purpose of that Quick Start Menu was to enable another area for Rogers to feed us ADs...
Now, this annoyance is multiplied even further when you're using a PVR, as now when you're trying to quickly switch between what you've recorded, what's scheduled to be recorded, and the actual TV Guide (for what you're planning to record), you now have this stupid Quick Start Menu which is thrown into the confusion, except it has no actual value except to make our TV watching lives harder..

Well, today my girl finally went nuts on the Quick Start Guide when she was in the middle of watching The Peacekeeper on MPIX On Demand, and she got that dreaded warning that a show is about to start recording.. You see, the Rogers box will only let you record 2 shows simultaneously (unlike other services which allow far more), and if you are watching a show when those 2 shows are about to start recording, the channel is about to change. And even worse, if you're watching something "On Demand", then you're doomed, as your box is about to boot and everything will be put in limbo for a minute or two...

Anyway, that happened to us today and we had to do some quick juggling with the Don Cherry biopic, the Simpsons, and the Peacekeeper -which she decided was the highest priority (obviously against my vote -which apparently is meaningless), and we therefore had to finish it. So, when trying to quickly do some rescheduling, and also saving of the missed minutes from the Cherry movie, she kept being hindered by that stupid quick start menu, and I was finally tasked with finding out how to disable it.

Please Note that the menu cannot be fully disabled (yet), but what can be done is you can change the order so that when you press GUIDE, the actual TV Guide comes up first before the Quick Start Guide, so essentially you will never see it again, if you don't press the Guide button twice.